While it is gaining in academic prominence, discussion of the imagination is too often neglected. Society is dangerously unaware of the intimate relationship between culture and politics, ethics and aesthetics. Challenging this, Jay Patrick Starliper examines the imagination through the lens of the work of Peter Viereck and other likeminded thinkers. The result is a philosophical deconstruction that demonstrates why "books are bullets."

In 1941, before Nazi barbarism was public knowledge, a young Peter Viereck published Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to...